


i'll stick with you baby for a thousand years

by saddestboner



Category: Baseball RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Girlfriends/No Wives, Boyish Roughhousing, Crushes, Don't copy to another site, Lucas Giolito Is In Love With Everybody, M/M, Manful Wrestling As A Deflection, see story notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:03:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22182322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saddestboner/pseuds/saddestboner
Summary: Lucas has always fallen in love too quickly, too easily. A pretty smile, a solid handshake, the pop of a heater into the catcher’s mitt, the sweeping break of a slider or the sharp drop of a curve, and he’d be gone.
Relationships: Jack Flaherty & Max Fried & Lucas Giolito, Jack Flaherty/Lucas Giolito, Lucas Giolito/James McCann (unrequited)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19
Collections: MLB Exchange 2019





	i'll stick with you baby for a thousand years

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aitoheiwa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aitoheiwa/gifts).

> Written for [Britt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aitoheiwa). Hope you enjoy!!! 
> 
> I leaned on [this article](http://nullrefer.com/?https://www.si.com/mlb/2018/02/28/lucas-giolito-max-fried-jack-flaherty-harvard-westlake) for reference. 
> 
> This also draws a little from a profile on Giolito that talks about his politics and mentions his being teased by his teammates.
> 
> **Additional Notes:** Lucas’s RL relationship is vaguely—and briefly—referred to as a past relationship. That wasn't originally the plan because Lucas's wife seems like a cool person, but that's just how it worked out. Also, I feel like I should point out that the Giolito/McCann isn't so much unrequited as it is... James just has no idea about it.
> 
> Title from "Golden Years," by David Bowie.

Lucas has always fallen in love too quickly, too easily. A pretty smile, a solid handshake, the pop of a heater into the catcher’s mitt, the sweeping break of a slider or the sharp drop of a curve, and he’d be gone. He was never much of a poet—Lucas left all the artistic and literary endeavors to his mom and dad—but when he was in love, he’d come up with soppy verse after soppy verse. Lines about curving smiles and beating hearts. Lips made for kissing, hands for holding, an entanglement of skin and mouths and other parts.

That’s how it was when he met Max in high school and, later, Jack. It’d felt inevitable with those two. Like the three of them were made to be teammates, their souls tied together with red string at birth. 

It always felt _right_ pulling that jersey over his head and looking up, seeing Jack and Max across the lockerroom in the same shades of red, white, and black. Lucas remembers wondering if he even wanted to play pro ball without Jack and Max always by his side. 

Sometimes, when he’s feeling self-pitying, Lucas wishes he hadn’t spent so much time being a hopeless romantic. Sometimes, he wishes he'd been brave. It was far too easy for Lucas to get his heart broken, and it still is. 

His mom told him once that he had a sensitive soul. An artist’s soul.

Lucas had never felt like one, but the way she said it—“you hold a baseball the way I hold a paintbrush”—made _sense_ to him. The ball was his tool, the strikezone his canvas. 

It was the first time all those jumbled feelings—_is this the right career path am I making the right choice am I good enough am I straight enough Christian enough invisible enough_—he carried inside finally settled into place. It was the first time he really believed.

* * *

Lucas doesn’t exactly know James, but he knows _of_ him from their years as rivals in the A.L. Central. He’s tall and stockily built, with arms the size of Lucas’s thighs, distractingly thick thighs of his own, and eyes as blue as the Pacific Ocean. He’s the new back-up catcher. Lucas is going to have to stare at those thighs a lot in the coming season. 

He hastily x-es out of James’s Instagram page.

It’s not a crush, though. He doesn’t do crushes on teammates, not anymore. And definitely not in the Majors. Definitely not with someone as married and Christian as James, either.

“It’s a crush.” 

Lucas looks up from his phone and makes a face. “I’m not even dignifying that with an answer.”

Jack kicks his shoes off and props his feet on Lucas’s coffee table.

Lucas huffs and leans over, lifting Jack’s legs and sliding that month’s issue of **Windy City Review** under his feet. Lucas’s smiling face graces the glossy cover. It’s a puff piece, mostly, about his off-field interests in film and politics, a little about his mom’s art and his dad’s movies. Some of the guys had given him a hard time about it, their jibes and barbs verging on too sharp, too personal to be totally friendly. Lucas ignores it, though, because it’s the only thing you can do. And he knows, deep down, they mean well. Probably. He proudly wears “snowflake” and “bleeding heart” like badges.

Jack holds up his cell phone to Lucas, screen out. He’s on James’s instagram page too. “He looks like your type.”

Lucas reaches out and knocks the phone out of Jack’s hand. “Fuck you.”

Jack retrieves his phone out of his lap. “Wouldn’t you rather have him do it?”

Lucas grabs a pillow off the couch and launches at Jack, intent on smothering him with it. “Remind me why we’re friends,” Lucas grunts, as he and Jack grapple over the pillow. 

Jack gets a couple licks in, a knee catching Lucas in the thigh and a fist landing in his kidney. “If you were really pissed you would’ve killed me, like, ten years ago.” Jack curls his fist in the collar of Lucas’s T-shirt and slaps him lightly on the face, startling him enough to throw him off. 

Lucas shoves the pillow back into Jack’s face. “I hate you.”

“We both know that’s a lie,” Jack cackles, his voice somewhat muffled by Lucas’s weapon of choice. He tugs it away from his face. “You talk a big game, but you got nothing.”

Lucas rolls his eyes and climbs off Jack. “I should make you sleep in the garage.”

“That’s no way to treat a friend.” Jack grins and folds his arms under his head. They both know Lucas would never kick Jack out. “I know how you get, though. You were the same way about Max. And Ari, too.”

Lucas sighs and sweeps his hands over his face and up into his hair. “Starting to regret inviting you to stay with me.”

“See, I don’t believe that,” Jack says, leaning into Lucas’s space, grasping his shoulder and squeezing gently. “I’m like the little voice on your shoulder.”

“You’re my shoulder devil,” Lucas says, dropping his hands and giving Jack a questioning look.

“What? No. I’m your angel.” He pauses. “That sounds kind of weird, now that I think about it.”

“Yeah. You? Someone’s conscience? Unrealistic.” Lucas shrugs Jack’s hand away. 

“Asshole,” Jack says mildly.

Jack leans down and picks up his phone. It’s still open on James’s Instagram page, on a picture of him and his pretty blond wife and their cherub-cheeked blond babies. Jack closes the app and the picture blinks away. 

“Maybe I should give Ari a call,” Lucas muses, mostly to himself. 

Jack barely stifles a groan. “It’s been a year,” he says.

“Yeah. So?” Lucas brings up his iPhone contacts list and starts scrolling until he lands on his ex-fiancée’s picture. 

Jack slaps the phone out of his hand and it lands on the coffee table with a hard thud. “You’re exes for a reason.”

“Just because of the distance. It wasn’t like we fell out of love or anything, or one of us cheated,” Lucas points out, picking his phone back up. 

“It was the distance. And the fact her job’s here in California and you’re in Chicago most of the year,” Jack says, twirling a finger at Lucas as he counts out all the ways Lucas’s longest-lasting relationship had fallen apart. “And the fact both of you were too stubborn to make concessions or compromise…”

“Shut up,” Lucas says, even though he knows—they both know—Jack is right. 

“You know I’m right,” Jack says. He glances at Lucas’s phone, then flicks his eyes up at Lucas. “You’ve got the hots for the new guy and you miss Ari, and you’re a chickenshit. But it’s fine. I still love you.”

Lucas groans. “You suck at pep talks.”

“You already knew this,” Jack says.

“And you’re right.” Lucas cringes as he admits it. 

“Now we’re getting somewhere.” Jack grins. 

“And you’re right that I love you,” Lucas says, because it’s true. It’s always been true. “I’m lucky you’re my best friend.”

“Damn right, you are.” Jack grabs Lucas around the midsection and tackles him into the couch. 

They land hard on the cushions and flop onto the floor, Lucas catches the table leg with his elbow—the one with the shiny, pink, L-shaped scar—and it reverberates through his whole body. It feels like high school again, when the three of them—him and Jack and Max—would regularly get into wrestling matches. When Lucas hurt his arm, Jack and Max would wrestle around on the carpet while Lucas watched and graded them on their technique. 

Now it’s him and Jack rolling around on the carpet like they’re kids again, with Lucas eighteen and dreaming about the Majors. And Jack was preparing to carry the whole program on his shoulders. He’d turned out to be the best of all three of them, breaking and setting his own records. 

Lucas catches a knee in the stomach and he thinks he knocks Jack upside the head with an elbow. They flop on their backs in the soft carpet, panting, struggling to catch their breath. 

“Too old for this,” Lucas says.

“You’re twenty-five, not eighty-five,” Jack says. 

Lucas sits up slowly and rakes his fingers through his hair. He looks down at Jack, who hasn’t so much as budged. He’s flushed from the exertion, cheeks ruddy, sweat beading on his forehead. And his shirt’s ridden up to reveal a flash of skin. Lucas’s fingers itch to yank at his shirt and pull it down, so he does, reaching out and tugging at it and then smoothing out the wrinkles with his thumb. 

It strikes him that this is far too intimate, but then again he’s always been like this with his friends. But he and Jack and Max were more than just friends. They were—they were something else entirely. A three-headed monster. Three souls in one. Lucas has never been good at being apart from them, but especially Jack. 

He draws his hand back.

Jack watches him, says nothing, just lays there and watches him.

Lucas glances back at Jack again. “I don’t have a crush,” he says.

Jack snorts out a soft laugh. He tucks his arm under his head. “Still on that?” 

“Yeah. And I don’t.” 

“Okay, sure,” Jack says.

This feels like a Moment. Capital-M moment and everything. So Lucas leans down and kisses Jack, a hand knotting loosely in the front of his T-shirt. 

Jack still doesn’t move, but that also means he’s not moving away or moving to hit Lucas. So, all told, it’s not bad.

When Lucas breaks the kiss and leans back, Jack sits up. He rubs a hand over his close-cropped hair and looks like he wants to say something but isn’t sure _what_ to say.

This wasn’t something they did as kids. Lucas was too busy focusing every cell in his body on baseball. He’d loved Jack and Max, but he’d kept it to himself. Mostly. Sometimes he couldn’t help but let a little of his love seep out. He’d just had so much of it to give.

“Is that why?” Jack asks.

“Is that why _what_?” Lucas echoes.

Jack punches him gently in the shoulder. “Is that why you don’t have a crush on the new guy?” 

“Actually, I lied. I _do_ have a crush on the new guy,” Lucas says, earning himself another friendly slug in the arm. “But I don’t love him.”

Jack’s mouth curves into a slow smile. “Oh. Is that so?” He reaches up, curls his fingers loosely in Lucas’s hair and tugs him closer. “Who do you love?”

“I think you know the answer to that,” Lucas says.

“Max?”

Lucas shoves him away. “You suck.”

“Only when asked nicely,” Jack says.

Lucas grins at him. “I’m asking nicely.”

“I don’t think you are.” Jack can’t help a laugh.

Lucas pretends to consider this. He shrugs. “Maybe not.”

“Well, you’re stuck with me for another three days,” Jack says, tugging at Lucas’s hair playfully. “We can work on it.”

Lucas tosses his phone aside and pulls Jack in for another kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> The author of this piece intends no insult, slander, or copyright infringement, and is not profiting from this work. This story is a complete work of fiction and does not necessarily reflect on the nature of the individuals featured. This is for entertainment purposes only. **If you found this story while Googling your name or the names of your friends, hit the back button now.**


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